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Pilots who fly or have flown planes for Amazon air told Business Insider an accident was inevitable.
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.
- Weeks before an Amazon Air plane crashed in February killing all 3 people on board, several pilots said they thought an accident was inevitable. Business Insider spoke with 13 pilots who work or have worked for Air Transport Services Group and Atlas Air Worldwide and have flown planes for Amazon Air.
- Elon Musk emailed every single Tesla employee that car deliveries should be their "primary priority" in what he's calling the biggest wave in company history. Tesla is racing to deliver cars before the end of the first quarter on March 31.
- Facebook employees had unfettered access to hundreds of millions of users' unencrypted passwords for years. Users' passwords were being stored in an unencrypted format, and reportedly were accessible by 20,000 workers at the company.
- Tesla is suing former employees, accusing them of stealing confidential information and giving it to robo-taxi rival Zoox. The company alleges in a new lawsuit that stolen documents helped Zoox "leapfrog" years of work on self-driving cars.
- Oracle quietly held a round of layoffs this week. This is not unusual for Oracle, which has held major layoffs every year.
- The CEO behind "Fortnite" says the entire video game industry is missing the "inevitable" trend as the barriers between consoles and smartphones get obliterated. CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney told Business Insider that the success of "Fortnite" shows that there's no such thing as a "mobile gamer" or a "console gamer" anymore.
- Walmart is reportedly considering taking on Google and Microsoft with a video game streaming service, according to US Gamer. The report comes just days after Google announced Stadia, an upcoming video game streaming service that aims to remove the need for expensive consoles.
- Facebook used experimental audio tech to shut down videos that AI missed after the New Zealand mosque massacres. In a blog published on Wednesday, the social media company admitted its use of AI for detecting harmful content was "not perfect."
- Amazon was accused of illegally firing a warehouse worker who protested against working conditions and HQ2. Rashad Long worked at the Staten Island warehouse, and in December participated in a protest over Amazon's planned HQ2 expansion.
- Reddit, Wikipedia, and PornHub are strong-arming users into protesting against laws that could change the face of the internet in Europe. The proposed copyright reform was already sent back to the drawing board once in July 2018, but received backing from the European Parliament in September.
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